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Really Late Reviews #3: Redjack – Revenge of the Brethren [misc]

[I wrote a few reviews of graphic adventure games in 2001, and Stephen Granade hosted them on the About.com interactive fiction site he ran at the time. I called them Really Late Reviews because, well, I wrote them long after the games in question had been released. About.com has gone so far down the Internet memory hole that I can no longer retrieve those reviews in the context of the site, so I’m taking their dates from the original text files on my hard drive. That means this review of Redjack: Revenge of the Brethren was written on July 18, 2001.]

So it came to pass that in January of 1999 I was wandering the aisles of a “Toys R Us”, after having exchanged a Christmas gift that didn’t suit my tastes. Those tastes being what they are, I found myself drawn to the computer game section of the store. There on the shelves was an adventure game called Redjack: Revenge of the Brethren, and something about the name rang a faint bell. Hadn’t I heard some good things about this game on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure? I thought so, and consequently I picked it up.

Okay, so I was a little crestfallen later, when I realized that the game I had been thinking of was Redguard, but as it turned out, my “To Play Someday” pile already had quite a few games on it, so I didn’t mind putting the game aside for a while. Now, as a part of my “Really Late Reviews” project, in which I play and review old adventure games with an eye towards learning more about good and bad game design, I’ve finally played through the game.

The verdict? Redjack is irritating in a lot of ways, but has tasty graphics and some pretty fun portions. Most of all, it’s an object lesson in the rewards and pitfalls of including action elements in an adventure game.

Redjack is a pirate game, and while some people are a sucker for this genre, I’m not one of them. I enjoyed the Monkey Island series, and Infocom’s Plundered Hearts, but “pirates” always seemed a rather narrow theme to me, and it’s an especially odd choice for an adventure game, given that any pirate adventure will inevitably draw comparisons to the aforementioned Monkey Island games, and almost as inevitably come up short. Redjack certainly does. To my mind, it’s better to choose settings and genres that haven’t already been thoroughly explored and dominated, if only so that players come to your game without preconceived notions or lofty comparisons.

My own experience of the game was affected adversely by misplaced expectations that Redjack‘s Nicholas Dove would be as interesting and funny a character as MI‘s Guybrush Threepwood. He isn’t, not by a long shot. What’s more, unlike Monkey Island‘s neatly tied narratives, Redjack never offers any explanation for the central question it raises: why is Nicholas Dove involved in the plot? And finally, the Monkey Island games, and LucasArts games in general, have taught me to expect (well, hope anyway) that adventure games will be designed well enough not to close themselves off for no good reason; Redjack disappointed me here, too, with an amazingly badly designed endgame.

Two equally plausible and compelling tasks are presented to the PC in this endgame, but there is only one right choice. Completing the “wrong” task makes it impossible to complete the other, which not only made no sense within the context of the story, but also completely destroyed my faith in the game’s design, right at the point that such faith was most critical. Listen up, designers: DON’T DO THIS.

Redjack wasn’t all nasty surprises, though. In fact, the plot held one or two twists that I found genuinely unexpected, and though these were leavened with a generous helping of cliché, I found I didn’t mind that too much either, since the clichés were so pleasurably pulpy. The story wanders around the Caribbean and the high seas to enjoyable effect, and there were a number of swashes that were lots of fun to buckle.

The puzzles, for the most part, were also fairly well-done. There was a recipe puzzle, though most of the ingredients for the recipe were available immediately to hand, which was a rather refreshing approach. There was a “mathematical sequence” puzzle (arrange things in a particular order while their placement exercises numerical effects on their layout), which was fun precisely because there was only one of them. However, most of Redjack‘s obstacles were not traditional adventure game puzzles, but instead action sequences, where the game’s usual interface evaporated, to be replaced with one of a variety of arcade-type mechanisms.

Now, let me make something clear: I have no problem with the concept of action/adventure hybrids. In fact, I’m rather a fan of blended genres in general. I saw Half-Life as sort of an action/adventure hybrid, with strong story and puzzles accompanying its more visceral thrills, and I loved that game. I’m currently quite addicted to Planescape:Torment, which is often held to be a kind of mutant child of CRPGs and text adventures. I’m no genre purist; I’m all for the various forms intermingling and colliding.

However (you had to know a “however” was coming), genre blending presents game designers and programmers with multiplied challenges. It’s hard enough to put together a solid story, engaging puzzles, interesting NPCs, and an intuitive interface. With an action/adventure, all these things aren’t enough — the action, too, must be gripping, with smooth response, clear feedback, and exciting mechanics. Redjack provides adventure elements of considerable quality, but falls down rather badly on its action elements.

This action comes in a variety of forms, all of which are quite primitive compared with modern action engines, or even old arcade ones. There’s a jumping “puzzle”, though unlike most of its ilk this one doesn’t involve split-second timing; there is a loose time-limit on how long the PC can be on most spots, but the jumping itself happens automatically — no fast fingers required. Instead, the player is tasked with crossing a dangerous area by jumping from one safe-spot to the next, and must assess which spots are too far away for jumping. Sound easy? Not when the area is presented with grainy, pixellated graphics that offer little in the way of depth representation.

There are a couple of “shooting-gallery” type puzzles, in which the player is presented with various moving, shooting targets, and must maneuver a crosshairs onto these to dispatch them. This has a lot of potential for fun, but that potential is wrecked by the game’s stuttering, jerky presentation of the action. I ran Redjack on a computer that far exceeded the game’s minimum requirements, but I was still plagued by hesitation and halting in most of the action sequences. This sort of thing is absolute poison to action gameplay. The most fun of all the action sequences was the cannons, for which the player has to compensate not only for moving targets, but for the trajectory of the projectiles. Yes, the jerkiness was still a problem in these sequences, but the absence of a counterattack lessened the frustration factor considerably. Also, ships hit with a cannonball exploded in very satisfying gouts of flame. Huh huh huh, huh huh huh.

The majority of the action sequences, though, were of the swordfighting variety. True to the rest of the game’s action tendencies, the swordfighting interface was clumsy, unresponsive, and erratic. The introductory portion of the game spends a significant amount of time and effort teaching this interface to the player, and this training is quite well-done. Unexpectedly, however, the training turns out to have little bearing on the game itself. Instead, most of the times Nicholas is in a swordfight, his opponent is virtually invincible, at least without recourse to some element technically outside the interface. The first time I was faced with this situation, and figured out how to solve it, was probably the best moment of the game for me. I was frustrated by my inability to defeat an opponent, and then I thought “What if I tried this?” and it worked — always a delicious feeling in an adventure game.

However, as that sort of situation came up over and over, I started to find it a little more frustrating. For one thing, many of the ways in which the game wanted me to behave where decidedly non-intuitive, and the responses to some of my actions made no sense. For another, it’s rather difficult to look outside the interface for possible solutions when an NPC is hammering away, a problem intensified by the game’s haphazard response times. And finally, the game’s reliance on adventureish solutions to actionish problems rendered its moments of actual action rather anticlimactic.

For me, it was a perfect illustration of the pros and cons of including action elements within an adventure game, or more specifically of changing interfaces during the course of a game. Redjack not only asked me to adjust to a new interface every couple of scenes, but also sporadically made that interface fairly useless, requiring some lateral thinking on my part. When this worked, the effect was beautiful, providing not just an action rush but a cerebral “Aha!” moment as well. However, the game didn’t provide enough of a logical framework, nor a smooth enough action interface, for the trick to work very often. More frequently, I found myself clicking away randomly at various spots on the screen, or growling at the primitive nature of the action mechanics, completely disengaged from the story and the game, and wishing I could go back to the game’s normal interface.

Not that said interface was without its problems. Redjack uses a 360-degree panning system, with considerable freedom to pan vertically as well, but there’s a catch. The panning behaves “inertially” — that is, as the game continues to pan in a particular direction, the panning picks up speed, and doesn’t halt immediately once the cursor is moved back to the center of the screen. The overall effect was a bit like being drunk, except without the euphoria. Needless to say, I stuck to keyboard navigation whenever possible, but there were a number of instances that required the use of the drunken mouse panning.

Adding to the panning difficulties was the fact that the bottom left corner of the screen contained the inventory interface, and whenever the mouse was placed there, all panning would halt quite abruptly. Thus, players always have to take extra care when panning left, lest their intentions be halted by the inventory displaying itself. On the plus side, this inventory required no management whatsoever, with items automagically disappearing once they are no longer useful. Redjack‘s method of object interaction takes a little getting used to — the game allows you to take an inventory item and stick it anywhere on screen, where it will stay through all panning and movement. It took me some time to recognize that this is pretty much never useful — if an inventory item is going to interact with something, it will do so immediately, and thus if it’s just “sticking” there, I’m on the wrong track. I would have preferred a little clearer feedback for this, like perhaps the inventory item being transferred back to the trunk when it is dropped in a non-useful spot.

One more technical comment, though it isn’t really about the interface: whenever Redjack loads a saved game, it goes through the process of transferring various files from the CD to the hard drive “to optimize game performance,” a process which can take as long as 60-90 seconds. People, this is silly. The files only need to be copied once, preferably at installation. Recopying them at every restore is not only a nuisance, it’s a completely pointless nuisance.

I mentioned that the beginning of Redjack contains an extensive section training the player on how to use the swordfighting interface. This training is an example of one of Redjack‘s best aspects: its use of NPCs as an in-game cueing mechanism. The game’s NPCs, while fairly broad stereotypes, are engaging and lively. Even better, they’re often a very useful source of hints and meta-game information, but that assistance is blended skillfully into the story. For example, that training sequence — Nicholas wants to join the crew of a pirate ship, but the Captain understandably wants him to learn how to hold his own in a fight first. So Nick finds a wayward pirate named Lyle, does him a favor, and in exchange Lyle teaches him how to fight.

Thus the player has an opportunity to learn the swordfighting interface, in a way that completely makes sense within the context of the story. In other sections of the game, Nick’s companions may offer puzzle hints, but only when asked. I was impressed with the slickness of this hint system — very rarely did a character point out the blindingly obvious, and when I felt genuinely stuck, my NPC companions often could offer a nudge that gave just enough information. Along with being a pretty snazzy hint system, this technique remedied a common problem with adventure games, that of NPCs who are supposedly intelligent and useful people but who completely fail to have any thoughts or insights about game situations.

The imperfection in the NPCs is their bizarre tendency to occasionally slide into anachronism or fourth-wall breaking. For instance, in that training sequence, Lyle says, “Ye stand right here while I open up my sack of whupass.” Now, I’m no student of the 18th century, but my instincts tell me that it’s a good bet no real pirate ever spoke the phrase “sack of whupass.” These kinds of obviously inappropriate references, while funny enough, threw me right out of the story without exception. In that same sequence, Lyle gives instructions like “use the left and right arrow keys on that keyboard thingy down there, and you’ll lean left or right.” The game is setting up a little confusion here: an in-game character is referring to meta-game mechanics, while trying to pretend he doesn’t really understand them because he’s an eighteenth century pirate? It doesn’t work. Also the voice-acting on the NPCs is generally pretty bad, though at least it’s done with a sense of energetic abandon.

These quibbles aside, the NPCs were one of my favorite things about the game. Another component that worked for me was the game’s graphics. These were appealingly cartoony, just a little more lifelike than the average Disney animated feature, with the occasional spectacular sky or artifact. There was a bit of strangeness with the panning — the graphics would get rather pixellated anytime they were in motion, snapping back into focus once the movement stopped. There were perspective problems, too, with the NPCs against the background, and occasionally I’d see a huge piece of someone’s head or arm blocking my view suddenly if they were in the wrong place relative to me.

Still, Redjack‘s world was a lot of fun to look at, and that goes for its cut-scenes as well. These scenes often had interesting camera angles or entertaining visual conventions (like the moving line on the map representing Nick’s travels.) I also liked the music fairly well, though it did tend to get a bit repetitive at times.

In short, I enjoyed the game most when it was at its most adventure-like. That’s not because I dislike action games, but because Redjack handled its action so ineptly. The lesson here is clear: if you’re going to include action in your adventure games, make sure that the action is just as compelling and fun as the adventure — otherwise you’ll end up with a game like Redjack, whose dashing adventure ultimately falls in defeat to the dull, heavy sword of its action.

Really Late Reviews #2: Riven [misc]

As I continue my project of trying to play and review the tall pile of game CDs sitting next to my computer, I start to get an idea of how the pile got so tall in the first place. I finished the first review (of The Space Bar) late in January 2001, and now I find myself in April only just finishing the second. Somehow real life keeps getting in the way. Well, that and writing text games. Let this be a lesson to you, kids. (Though just what the lesson is, I’m not sure.)

The idea behind these “Really Late Reviews” isn’t to help people decide whether or not to buy a particular game — in the vast majority of cases, the games probably aren’t available anymore except through auction sites and dusty bargain bins. Even Riven, one of the biggest hits ever, is no longer in print, though it’s not too hard to find. Instead, these reviews try to focus on what does and doesn’t work in a specific game with an eye towards good and bad design decisions in general for adventure games.

The scrutiny is perhaps especially appropriate in this case, since Myst and Riven were such humongous hits that they had to be doing something right for somebody. The fact that they’ve both received such tremendous backlash from some hardcore adventure gamers is, to me, just more evidence of this fact. The tone of many of those complaints always reminded me of the irritation felt by longtime fans of groups like U2 and Nirvana after those groups got big, annoyance that their hip and private playground had suddenly been invaded by the unwashed masses.

It’s not that I thought that all the criticisms of Myst were baseless — on the contrary, I was just as annoyed by its anticlimactic ending and its sometimes pointless puzzles as anybody. But the vehemence of those objections always felt a bit out of place to me. I will say, though, that I’ve always been struck by the irony of Myst‘s emphasis on books, and the same is true for Riven. Here we have the adventure games that, more than any single other, took players’ hands off the keyboard and placed emphasis totally on mouse interaction, yet their central metaphor is of books as transportation devices.

In fact, when one of those books opens and we see that the pages are in fact blank, and in place of the text is an animated graphic, we might realize that there, conveniently displayed before us, is the Myst aesthetic: gorgeous art on the simplest background, divorced from (con)text as much as possible. For an old text adventurer like me, there was something amusing about the fact that the games had such a worshipful attitude towards books and pages, while eschewing actual words almost completely. I say almost because the games can’t quite manage to avoid presenting text, and consequently end up hitting players with giant swaths of it at once. But more about that later.

Of course, the point has been made before that this very ejection of text in favor of art was one of the keys to Myst‘s success, and it’s a point I find persuasive. I know that while playing Riven, I enjoyed how easy it was to find one breathtaking vista after another, even before any puzzles had been solved, with only a few mouse-clicks. That simplicity is a solid virtue, and the fact that almost anybody could figure out the interface within 60 seconds had to have helped the game’s popularity. Simplicity and dazzle are a powerful combination, and Riven has both in spades — it’s no wonder that so many other games have copied its interface.

But as easy as that interface was to use, I found it frustrating at points. For one thing, the fact that Riven‘s graphics were so detailed, with so many subtle areas of light and shadow, meant that in any given screen, there were several features that might yield results when clicked upon. Consequently, I found myself doing a lot of random clicking in a great many places. It’s not that this approach is difficult, but it does get rather tedious, especially when only one out of oh, say 75 of those clicks actually accomplished anything. Another problem with the Riven hunt-the-hotspot interface is that for unspecified areas of many screens, clicking would actually advance the PC forward, while clicking elsewhere would have no effect. Numerous were the times when I’d have to backtrack because I’d moved forward without wanting to.

The answer to these problems would have been just a little more cursor differentiation. Riven already has this feature for some areas. For example, when the cursor would turn into finger pointing right, clicking would turn the PC 90 degrees to the right. When the cursor becomes a grabbing hand, you know it’s possible to click and drag the feature beneath it. If only it had lit up on other (non-draggable) hotspots and evinced some difference between forward motion and no effect, I could have been saved a lot of pointless clicking. These features seem so obvious that I wondered whether they had been omitted in the name of making the game more challenging. If so, they certainly served their purpose, but increased challenge of that sort doesn’t make a game any more fun, just more numbing.

But even when I’d feel myself sliding into a stupor from all the fruitless clicking, Riven would always reawaken me with its phenomenal art. This game is known for its graphics, and rightly so — even its fiercest critics may allow that it’s “pretty.” I’ll say more than that: it’s stunning. The level of detail in rocks, plants, and skies made them feel indelibly real, and the effect was aided by all the tiny touches that were put in just to enhance the game’s feeling of presence. In a forest, tiny fireflies (or are they dust motes) swirl around you, for no other reason than to deepen the aura of enchantment. Water shimmers and refracts brighter and darker colors up at you, creating a remarkably mimetic effect.

From time to time you’ll see other people, always shying away from you and warning their companions of your presence like timid prairie dogs. The other thing that just knocked me out about some of the graphics in Riven was their choice of colors and level of color saturation. When an elevator descends from the ceiling, it isn’t just gold, it’s GOLD. When the pathway from that elevator leads to a huge viewport on the ocean, it’s hard not to be awed by the intense BLUEness of that panorama.

Riven‘s puzzles partook of a similar intensity and attention to detail, and there were plenty of neat ones. I won’t discuss them in too much detail, since I don’t want to spoil the game for those who might still seek it out, but I will say that the game often rewards sophisticated spatial thinking, and that the solutions often require bringing together disparate pieces of information in crafty and revelatory ways.

In fact, my main criticism of the puzzles is that sometimes they go one step too far in this direction. In one instance, several things clicked together at once in my brain and I realized that I had figured out a puzzle that was cunning and delicious, but when I went to solve it, I found it unyielding. Turns out that the game had established a pattern of clues in four out of five sub-parts of the puzzle, but had broken that pattern in the fifth part, presumably to make things more challenging. My frustration arose from the fact that where I had once felt clever for teasing out the underlying motif, I now felt cheated out of the solution I’d earned, for no compelling reason. The pattern-matching was a bit of a stretch already, and when the pattern was arbitrarily broken, the puzzle started to feel a little unfair to me. Other problems occurred in one or two combination locks whose solutions didn’t quite make enough sense, including one in particular that I had to try over and over until it worked, even though previous attempts with the same combination had failed.

This last may have been a technical problem, and if so, it was one of the few bugs I encountered in Riven. There were little problems here and there, usually having to do with the cursor changing shape erroneously, sometimes making me wonder if I was missing additional screens because of an error in the navigation routines. Besides the art, the game’s other really outstanding technical achievement was in its sound. I recently bought a new computer with a powerful soundcard and speaker set, and Riven took the fullest advantage of these. The music was understated and evocative, and the foreground sound effects achieved a remarkable level of verisimilitude. But even when these weren’t playing, the game kept up a steady stream of ambient background noises — chirping birds and insects in a forest, lapping waves at the seashore, echoing droplets of water underground, and so on.

These sounds blended seamlessly into each other and did a lovely job of completing the sense-picture started by the graphics. On the other hand, a five-second foreground sound effect that’s enchanting the first time through becomes really annoying the fifth time. Riven provided the option to skip transition animations, thank goodness, but omitted any such feature for sound effects, with the result that I sometimes had to stop a quick run through already-explored areas just so I could let a sound play yet again.

However, this interruption wasn’t as inconvenient as the numerous occasions when Riven would ask me to swap among its five CDs. I have two CD-ROM drives in my current machine, and I still felt like I was constantly disk-swapping, especially as I got further into the game and was doing a lot of hopping from one area to another. I’ve read that a Riven DVD was released which eliminates this problem, and if you’re still looking for the game, I’d highly recommend pursuing this option — the game casts such a lovely spell that I wanted it broken as little as possible.

Prisons are a recurring motif in Riven. In fact, at the beginning of the game you’re given a “prison book” that you’re supposed to use to capture the Bad Guy, but as soon as you’re transported into the game, you find yourself in an actual prison (you know, with bars), where the book gets stolen from you. On the way to retrieving it, you’ll explore a number of different cages and cells, and in fact you’ll be imprisoned yourself when the book is returned to you. All this incarceration felt like an appropriate theme, because it nicely symbolized my relationship to the plot.

I think it’s fair to say that Riven‘s story is very poorly paced. At the beginning of the game you’re given a number of teasers (and references that seem inexplicable if you haven’t played Myst and/or read the tie-in novels recently, which was exactly my situation) and then thrown immediately into the standard lovely-but-abandoned landscape. From there, it’ll be a loooong time until you get more story. Oh sure, there’ll be hints and evocative little clues of what’s going on, but I found myself wishing for more narrative throughout the game, instead of the endless wandering, button-pushing, and lever-throwing that I got instead. This feeling was not alleviated when I finally stumbled across one of the game’s several plot-advancing journals. These journals are uniformly massive, page after page of spidery handwritten text that provides plenty of plot detail and background information (more than enough, in fact) along with some well-placed puzzle hints.

The problem with these things is that they take a long time to read, and whenever I’d find one I’d sigh, realizing that my next half-hour or so would be spent slogging through a sea of text. Trapped in this stumbling rhythm, I began to feel like a starving detainee (albeit one with a very large cell in which to pace), begging piteously for a few more scraps of plot, please, and instead given massive meals every six days.

In the end, I decided that I wasn’t playing Riven for its story, and allowed myself to sink more deeply into its lovely graphics, sounds, and puzzles like a warm bath. I came out feeling refreshed and contented, more or less happy for the time I’d spent with the game.

Really Late Reviews #1: The Space Bar [misc]

For several years now, I’ve had a growing pile of commercial adventure game CDs sitting next to my computer. For one reason or another, I haven’t gotten around to playing them, but when the millennium turned, I decided I was going to change all that. I’m playing through them now, and for each one I play, I’m hoping to write a review. These reviews won’t be aimed at helping people decide whether or not to buy the games — they’re mostly out of print now, so the point is pretty moot. (Although many of them could no doubt be obtained through eBay or bargain bins.) Instead, I want these “Really Late Reviews” to be meditations on what works and what doesn’t in graphical adventure games, as illustrated by the successes and failures of each work under scrutiny.

The game on top of the pile was The Space Bar, Steve Meretzky‘s first post-Legend foray into graphical adventures. Meretzky has a good name among text adventure enthusiasts like me for having written landmark Infocom games like Planetfall and A Mind Forever Voyaging. I wasn’t as fond of his later works for Legend Entertainment, the Spellcasting series, because what clever writing and puzzles they did contain were submerged in a sea of juvenile, sexist humor, but they were commercial hits and plenty of people enjoyed them. After he left Legend, he founded a company called Boffo Games, Inc., and created The Space Bar, a large adventure game that was to be Boffo’s flagship product. Despite good reviews, the game sunk, and so did Boffo. Maybe this postmortem will provide a little perspective on just where TSB went wrong.

The game puts you in the role of Alias Node, a human detective on the seedy world of Armpit VI, investigating a robbery and murder whose culprit has been traced to a dive called The Thirsty Tentacle. The bar, like the rest of the galaxy, is populated by aliens of various races, but very few other humans. Your job is to interview these aliens, looking for clues about the identity of the killer, and using your special ability of “Empathy Telepathy” to enter their memories and guide those flashbacks to discover vital bits of information. In effect, these flashbacks serve as mini-adventure games in themselves, and the bulk of TSB is spent navigating the memories of various aliens, with occasional excursions back into the Thirsty Tentacle to meet other aliens and, finally, to catch the criminal.

The aliens are definitely the best part of the game, springing as they did from the imagination of Ron Cobb, the same guy who designed the eye-popping oddities that populate the Star Wars cantina scene. Copious background information on each alien species enlivens the game, and deepens the experience of otherness that permeates the flashbacks. Visually, too, the game does a terrific job with the aliens, and here we see one of the great strengths of graphical games. Text is wonderful for evoking interior worlds, but for the presentation of bizarre shapes and structures, it’s hard to beat good graphics. For example, a text game might tell you that Sraffans have hourglass-shaped pupils, but it would be hard put to present the labyrinthine network of veins surrounding the pupil, or to take your perspective inside those eyeballs as the flashback begins. TSB uses graphics in some clever ways throughout the game, including a freaky perspective from within the compound eyes of an insectoid race.

So The Space Bar is clever, and visually engaging. It also has its fair share of funny moments, thanks to Meretzky, who’s much funnier when he’s not aiming at 13-year-olds. Unfortunately, fun as it is to look at, it’s often not much fun to play. In struggling through the game, I found myself thinking quite a bit about the problems of translating text-game writing experience to the creation of graphical games, and wondering if TSB‘s many flaws stemmed from those problems.

Take, for example, the game’s interface. If you don’t have a parser and prompt, something must obviously take their place, and in this case it was the standard 360-degree panning worldview (with a bit of up/down axis as well), augmented by a multi-purpose onscreen device called the PDA: a combination map, inventory, system command portal, voice-mail receptor, and information storehouse. The idea of the PDA is a sensible one, but its implementation in TSB was extremely clumsy. Rather than occupying a stable portion of the screen, it rises up to half-obscure the main window whenever you click on it, spending the rest of its time half-visible, with half its features unavailable.

One of the most important of these unavailable features is the voice-mail indicator, which blinks when Alias receives a message. Because the light is obscured from view except when the PDA is fully visible, you end up receiving messages and not knowing it for dozens of turns, until the little voice inside your PDA says “Have you noticed your message light is blinking?” Why no I hadn’t, probably because I CAN’T SEE IT! It’s silly that the blinking light is hidden, but even the hidden light is a better solution than the one the game adopts occasionally, which is to have the PDA suddenly rise up and stop all action as a message comes in and is played.

When this happens (and it’s usually at the worst times), the player has to wait for the game to speak its message before continuing on with any actions, and therein lies another significant difference between graphical and text adventures. Text adventures print all their output, which takes pretty much no time at all. Graphical adventures have voice-acting, which means that to receive the dialogue, the player has to wait as long as it takes for that dialogue to be spoken… every single time. The voice acting in TSB is excellent, so it’s a pleasure to hear the dialogue in real time when you’re hearing it initially, but when you already know what’s going to be said, even the best voice acting can become tedious indeed. TSB often provides the option of hitting Esc to halt these sequences, but all too often Esc doesn’t have an effect, and you’re left drumming your fingers while a phrase plays for the tenth time.

Even worse, when realtime voices are overlaid on turn-based gaming, the resulting timing confusion can turn an extremely simple puzzle into a maddeningly difficult one. For example, in one of the flashbacks, you’re waiting for your name to be called before you can leave a particular room. However, there are about 10 voice phrases that play before that happens, each of which is around 30-45 seconds long. The phrases play one per turn, so if you perform actions which advance the turn counter (examining things, inventory management, etc.) and space them less than 30 seconds apart, the phrases pile up and play one after the other. When this happens, you’ll hear your name called, and try to leave the room, but the turn when you were supposed to do that has long passed, so the game goes on to say “Oh, too bad you didn’t leave the room — you lose” as you’re frantically clicking away. Doctors recommend against this sort of game design, as it leads to many cases of heads embedded in monitors.

Another sin of sound design which TSB commits over and over is having background noises drown out crucial information. For example, there’s a scene where you’re performing your actions while a thunderstorm rages in the background. In a text adventure, the scene would look like this:

> EXAMINE WATERFALL The water sounds funny -- there might be something behind it.

KER-POW! Deafening thunder shakes the ground where you stand.

In The Space Bar, you click on the “Examine Waterfall” icon, and what you hear is the flashback character’s voice: “The water sounds funny. There mi– KER-POW! –it.” Then the sound you hear is yourself growling, as you realize that the game has stupidly and randomly allowed a background sound to prevent you from learning information that, as the character, you should theoretically already know. In other words, an actual sound has obscured a symbolic sound, the latter of which is only meant to represent the character’s interior dialogue. This happens over and over again, in several flashbacks, and each time it does, you have to repeat the action and hope you get lucky enough to hear the information you’re supposed to have.

That same thunderstorm flashback also features another one of TSB‘s biggest gaffes: the realtime puzzle. There’s a chase sequence in this flashback in which you have to make the correct series of clicks and rotations, in an extremely limited period of time, and if you don’t the flashback ends unsuccessfully. Maddeningly enough, this is exactly the time when your PDA chooses to rise up and halt all action until it finishes playing the incoming message. Because restoring from a failed flashback is blindingly dull [you have to listen to the failure message in real time, then get past the transition animation, then trigger the flashback again, then another transition animation, then the beginning-of-flashback animation, and only then can you restore your game], the punishment for failure is quite steep.

Add to this the fact that the processor load in that flashback makes cursor movement jerky, and panning unreliable, and you have one annoying roadblock. Now, I’m not of the school of thought that believes adventure games should never ever have realtime action portions, though I do believe it’s a bad idea to throw one arcade sequence into an otherwise traditional adventure game (which is exactly what The Space Bar does.) I enjoy both adventure gaming and twitch gaming, and don’t mind seeing the two mixed, but they have to be done well — if I fail, I want it to be because of slow reflexes, not a slow processor. My P-166 seems pretty pokey these days, but in 1997, when The Space Bar came out, it was well above the game’s minimum requirements.

Still, I gritted my teeth through many attempts at this puzzle before finally, gratefully getting past it. In a text adventure, that realtime puzzle would probably still be annoying, but because the processor demands of text are minimal, the computer’s speed would very likely not be the bottleneck that impedes completion of the puzzle.

Another side effect of the increased complexity of sounds, images, and animations in a graphical adventure game is their increased size and consequent separation onto multiple disks. The Space Bar comes on three CDs, two of which contain flashback material and the other one of which contains all the sequences within the bar itself. As a result, every time a flashback begins or ends, you have to switch CDs. I needn’t point out that a text adventure is highly unlikely to fill more than one CD and therefore to require such constant switching, but I will note that the drudgery of such switches imposes unnatural limits on both design and playing.

Because I was trying to minimize CD switching, I stayed within each flashback and tried to solve them in their entirety one at a time, instead of hopping from one to the next anytime I got stuck, as I probably would have in a text game. In effect, the disk switching became another of the game’s many resource management problems, but one of its least enjoyable. The best of these puzzles take advantage of the potential of graphics to easily demonstrate spatial relationships, and end up achieving effects that would be extremely difficult in a text game. The worst of them work through the game’s regular interface, and the presence of graphics and sound slows down the solving process to no real benefit. Elements that slow the process of solving a puzzle by means of arbitrary and pointless delays make that puzzle much less fun. Text has an advantage here, because its elements very rarely cause time delays.

Another advantage of text is its ability to clearly separate objects. For instance, in one of the game’s flashbacks, you stand before a house. There’s a boat locker in front of the house, from which you must obtain a vital object. The problem is that the locker blends in a bit with the house itself, and both the house and the locker are clickable objects. Consequently, you can click on several features of the house, all of which the game will process as the house itself. The only exception to this is the locker, but when the windows, the roof, the chimney, and the pipes are all called “House”, why would a player think that the little brown square representing the locker is anything but another unimplemented house feature? What’s more, you can get irretrievably stuck in the flashback and not know why — I had to look at a walkthrough, and when I did I said, “What locker?” In a text adventure, this simply wouldn’t be an issue, because objects don’t overlap:

Beside the House Be it ever so humble, this is your home. The roof, windows, chimney, and pipes may all be a bit ramshackle, but they're all yours.

There is a boat locker in front of the house.

There’s no chance you could miss the boat locker (as I did playing TSB), because the interface never obscures it.

Reading through this review, I’m worried that it sounds like I’m railing against graphic adventures in general, and arguing that text is always better. I hope it doesn’t sound like that, because I don’t believe that. For one thing, The Space Bar has several problems that are equally possible in text adventures (an extremely irritating maze, several bugs, one of which almost kept me from finishing the game.) For another, I don’t think that superiority and inferiority enter into the equation at all — I just think that text adventures and graphic adventures are distinctly different forms, kind of like (to employ a tired analogy) novels and films. The skill sets required to create each of them overlap a bit, but not nearly as much as you might guess. Playing The Space Bar felt reminiscent of watching a film directed by a really good novelist who knows very little about moviemaking. You can see what was intended, and if you look harder, you can see why for the most part it all falls horribly flat.

Cracking The Code by Gunther Schmidl as Anonymous [Comp00]

IFDB page: Breaking The Code
Final placement: 53rd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Thank god for Stephen Granade. Without him, not only would I think that Cracking the Code is completely pointless, I’d also be totally confused as to what it’s even about. However, thanks to a handy post he wrote on his About.com IF site, I’ve been educated on the controversy surrounding the DeCSS code for decrypting DVD output.

For those of you not in the know, apparently eight big movie studios won a lawsuit against a hacker newsletter for posting code known as DeCSS, code that allows you to decrypt the data on a DVD. This code allows you to write your own DVD player without paying royalties, and to copy the information on a DVD. The law that supported the suit is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which forbids dissemination of information about how to bypass copyright security. According to the judge, you can’t post the code or even link to the code.

Lots of people are up in arms about this perceived restriction of free speech. Somebody even wrote a very funny song about it, with the code in the lyrics — the argument goes like this: if the US First Amendment protects freedom of expression, doesn’t that take precedence over the courts’ suggestion that the code is illegal under the DMCA? And if so, isn’t it legal to spread the decryption code via a legally protected form, such as songwriting?

I suppose the argument goes the same way for this “game”. Really, though, this piece of work does virtually nothing to wrap any kind of creative content around the DeCSS code. It’s more or less an unadorned room with a stub description, containing two pieces of paper that have the code written on them. That’s it. Other than what I just mentioned, it’s an Inform shell game. Minimalist, yes. Entertaining, no.

It’s hard to even call CTC subversive, as it is so clearly uninterested in IF and therefore fails to subvert IF in any interesting way. In my opinion, it also doesn’t do much for making the First Amendment case. I mean, at least the song had a tune, and some lyrics outside the code, and whatnot. CTC, on the other hand, offers nothing at all in the way of IF. It’ll come in handy, though, when I decide to write my own DVD player. That’s on my list right behind sewing my own clothes and authoring an IF game with a homebrew parser.

Rating: 1.2